Prednisone, and it definitely altered my personality significantly. I also ordered $400 worth of RC quadcopter parts, and spent 8 hours straight sanding off and re-polishing the top surface of my eyeglass lenses to get rid of the anti-reflective coating that was cracked and pitted.
In the month leading up to that, interactions at work were also giving me anxiety bordering on panic attacks, like a visceral fight-or-flight response. That turned out to be my atrioventricular nerves progressively failing, such that my heart ventricles were beating slower and asynchronously from my natural pulse rate. I got down to 21 beats per minute at one point, and everyone at the hospital was amazed I was walking around and smiling rather than
on the ground unconsciouss.
I'm pretty much back to 100% now, and as an embedded software engineer, I am horrified to be able to say that I'm bluetooth enabled.
I knew someone who was on prednisone for 3 days. They got 6 days worth of things done in those 3 days, then spent the next 3 days of withdrawal in bed unable to do anything.
Also: this is wildly off topic, but did your 8 hours of sanding off cracked anti-reflective coating work? What equipment did you need? I had a similar issue and it never occurred to me that it might be fixable at home.
Yeah, it worked pretty well for my purpose. The only downside is that the edges got a bit rounded off, leading to more distortion than ideal in my peripheral vision. It was definitely an improvement overall, in that I was less steroid-aggro while wearing them afterward. My brain had no trouble filtering out the increased distortion, vs. the visual artifacts (starbursting) from the worn out coatings.
I sanded the lenses by hand with 200 grit, then 400 grit, then 800 grit wet sand paper. There was the AR coating, but then under that there was some sort of underlying "toughness" coating that I had to completely sand through to get down to polycarbonate. That's what took the longest, since I didn't really know how far I needed to go with it, and it was fairly resistant to the abrasion. I tried soaking the lenses in isopropyl alcohol to soften the coatings, but I don't think it helped at all vs. just applying elbow grease. Once the surfaces were uniformly smooth but frosty looking, I polished them with Novus plastic polish #3, then #2, then #1. It wasn't perfect like a new lens, but the center was optically clear without any starburst reflections. With all the coatings gone, the polycarbonate quickly picks up little scratches just from cleaning, but it's quick to polish out again.
It was worth it to keep me from going completely insane for the next month it took me to get an eye exam and order new glasses.
Taking corticosteroids briefly then stopping cold turkey like that is pretty rough on your endocrine system. I had to be on the high dose for many weeks to get the desired effect, and my doctor had me slowly taper off over the course of a few months to keep from crashing like that.
Ah, that totally makes sense. In retrospect it totally makes sense that the aggressive inflammation reduction of high-dose corticosteroids could cause that. By analogy, it's well-known that animals (including humans ofc) exhibit "sickness behavior" where they are lethargic, avoid social interaction, etc, which is probably (a) an "intentional" adaptation and (b) can probably be explained largely by the increase in inflammation from the immune response
